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><P
> It is hard to estimate how many people have tried Bochs or use it on a
regular basis, but a few statistics give an indication.  The <A
HREF="c2804.html#BOCHS-DEVELOPERS"
>bochs-developers mailing list</A
>, which is the
primary source of news on bugs and releases, has over 400 subscribers.  The
latest version has been downloaded over 150,000 times from SourceForge, not
counting any mirror website or SVN users.</P
><P
>Bochs has many possible uses, and different people use it for different
things.  Many people use it to run applications in a second operating system
without needing two different computers or dual-booting.  Running
Windows software on a non-x86 workstation or on an x86 Unix box are common
uses.  Also, because every hardware instruction and every line of simulator
code is accessible, Bochs is used extensively for debugging new operating
systems.  If you were writing boot code for your home-brewed
x86 operating system and it didn't work right, booting it in Bochs could
give you great visibility into what is really going on.  The Bochs
debugger lets you simulate quickly or slowly, pausing whenever you want
to look at the contents of memory or the CPU registers.  Or, if you
wanted to study which parts of a program take the most time, you could use
Bochs to measure how often certain pieces of the code were executed.</P
><P
>Bochs has been used as a teaching tool in Operating Systems classes, in which
students used and modified it to learn how the PC hardware works.  As a final
project the students had to add a new peripheral device, so they had to learn
all about I/O ports, interrupts, and device drivers.  In industry, it is used
to support legacy applications on modern hardware, and as a reference model
when testing new x86-compatible hardware.</P
><P
>There may be as many uses of Bochs as there are users.  Do you want to run
your old DOS games?  Or learn how to program under GNU/Linux, without leaving your
Windows desktop?  Or reverse engineer your printer driver?  You decide.</P
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